Cato Brochure

Cato's pamphlets are the printed face of Cato's campaign inside the System: glossy, plastic-laminated sheets carrying words and images that present his position to beings who have no ordinary access to him. They are not merely announcements. Passed through auctions, hidden among supplies, and aimed at specific audiences, they make Cato's distant rebellion legible as a personal invitation, while forcing readers to reconsider whether the System's account of reality and identity can be trusted.

Definition and Material Form

The pamphlets belong to a broader body of Cato material that the System cannot readily classify. At an auction attended by thousands of booths and a less prestigious pit below, the auctioneer displayed leaflets and pamphlets alongside foodstuffs and pieces of art that Cato had supplied. The materials were packaged in the special cases Cato used to drop supplies from orbit, and their alien character was immediately apparent. The Auction House verified that the objects had no determinable origin, although it could not fully confirm every claim surrounding them. Even the ordinary Appraise function could not reveal all their secrets, because the materials were presented as possibly originating from beyond the System.

Their physicality matters. The glossy plastic laminate, standard letter-sized format, and combination of words and pictures distinguish them from normal System items. When an Azoth brought one into the Team Fun guild hall, Kiersten could recognize it before turning around. The sheet was visibly foreign to the usual System inventory, and she could read it from across the room. The pamphlet therefore announces its origin before its argument is absorbed: its material surface is already evidence that another technological and cultural order exists outside the System's familiar categories.

Distribution as Political Strategy

The pamphlets became widely interesting only because Raine and Leese devised a distribution method that could reach powerful people who would otherwise ignore the Crusade. At an auction, Lorraine suggested selling Cato's propaganda material rather than treating the event merely as a place to acquire resources. Raine and Leese recognized that the Azoths and Alums gathered there were unlikely to care about the Crusade, since those interested in pursuing it would already be elsewhere. The pamphlets could instead make them curious enough to contact Cato.

Leese implemented the plan through one of the sisters' most useful abilities: altering identities and moving through the System without exposing their normal roles. She left the private booth, shifted into a much smaller four-armed species, and submitted the material from elsewhere. Afterward she traveled to the nearest Inner World to dispose of the receipt token, because the System could track the transaction through it. The operation shows that the pamphlets do not circulate through open political channels. Their movement depends on disguise, compartmentalization, and the sisters' ability to separate the public seller from the actual source.

The auction house presented the material as a rare lot captured from the mysterious being known as Cato. The supplier provided descriptions beyond what Appraise could determine, encouraging buyers to treat the objects as evidence of an origin beyond the System rather than as curiosities with no context. The lot contained mostly leaflets and pamphlets, but the inclusion of food and art made the message more concrete: Cato was not only an abstract enemy or rumor. He could send unfamiliar objects, provisions, and cultural artifacts from orbit into the lives of System inhabitants.

The strategy produced scarcity as well as publicity. The pamphlets were expensive and not widely distributed, especially because some divine users condemned possession of the material. Yet the auction gave them a visibility that ordinary clandestine delivery could not have achieved. A small number of objects became a larger rumor, and the rumor created a demand among beings who wanted to see something that the System itself could not explain.

Targeted Messages and Recruitment

The pamphlets were not interchangeable propaganda. At least some were directed toward particular audiences. Kiersten realized that the sheet brought into Team Fun was blatantly from Cato and aimed directly at other humans. Its argument about alterations made to human minds by the System matched suspicions she already possessed, which gave the document force beyond its explicit claims. The pamphlet did not simply tell her that Cato opposed the System; it supplied a framework through which her own unease could be interpreted as evidence of manipulation.

It also contained instructions for contacting Cato. Those instructions transformed the leaflet from a statement into an access point. Kiersten understood that contacting him carried risks, but she judged that an Alum did not have much to fear unless a god was actively spying on her. She concealed the leaflet's existence from Morvan, whose dislike of Cato had hardened into hatred and who would have refused even to speak with him. After leaving the Team Fun guild hall, Kiersten used movement Skills and her Domain to pass through the portal network without attracting the disruption that an Alum's unshielded movement through the Inner Worlds or Frontier would have caused. Following the pamphlet's directions, she traveled to a Hunting World and wrote enormous human-alphabet letters in the dirt, each roughly ten feet tall, so that orbital surveillance could find her.

This episode demonstrates the pamphlet's unusual power over identity and allegiance. Kiersten does not accept Cato's benevolence without reservation, but she distinguishes skepticism from refusal. The document gives her a choice that the System's ordinary structures do not appear to offer: she can investigate the source of the doubts that the System itself has produced. The leaflet thus recruits not through unquestioning faith, but through recognition, suspicion, and the promise of direct contact.

Contact with Independent Elites

The pamphlets also served as introductions to figures who were not ordinary recruits. Raine and Leese used them to approach Shiel-Ruyu, presenting the material as a way to offer him the new experiences he had previously wished to see. When they met him in his office, Raine asked whether he had encountered the Cato material circulating through the System. Shiel-Ruyu had, and remarked that it was expensive. Raine then produced a pamphlet from storage.

Shiel-Ruyu immediately inferred that the sisters were not merely purchasers. The pamphlet was directly addressed to him, and its brightly colored plastic was unlike anything the System offered. Leese confirmed that they were the source. She explained that, since Shiel-Ruyu did not seem to value power for its own sake, they wondered whether he would be interested in seeing new things. His response was cautious rather than openly hostile: he warned them to be more careful because another Alum might care more about the System.

The meeting reveals a second mode of persuasion. With Kiersten, the pamphlet exposes a possible injury to the mind and invites rebellion. With Shiel-Ruyu, it tests curiosity and intellectual independence. The same object can therefore function as accusation, invitation, proof, and social signal, depending on the reader's relation to the System. Its political usefulness lies partly in this adaptability: Cato's message can reach people through their doubts without requiring them to share all of his motives.

Relationship to Cato's Wider Campaign

The pamphlets are inseparable from Cato's larger struggle against System administration, divine authority, and the psychological incentives built into the System. Cato has seen how the System extracts names and species directly from consciousness, how it rewards killing with euphoric essence feedback, and how quests can exert a form of compulsion beyond ordinary motivation. From that perspective, distributing information is itself a countermeasure against behavioral control. The pamphlet offers an interpretation that the System cannot safely provide: that its rewards, identities, and apparent direction may be mechanisms of domination rather than evidence of truth.

The object also travels alongside material aid. Cato tells a king that his supplies are intended not merely to feed a kingdom but to feed an entire world, including Raine and Leese, who come from another world pillaged by the System. The pamphlets and the food dropped from orbit therefore belong to the same political language. Cato presents himself as a source of foreknowledge, technology, provisions, and repair for worlds damaged by System activity. The printed message gives ideological form to the practical claim that he can preserve life where the System has left devastation.

That contrast is sharpened by reactions from the System's defenders. Muar, after experiencing a blank System-less space with no status, Skills, or meaningful way to understand the world, comes to regard the System as a source of direction, reward, and purpose. He accepts a Crusade quest and leaves Uriva intending to warn other worlds about Cato's agents. Elsewhere, high-ranking elders discuss countermeasures against Cato's Copper creatures and consider imposing portal thresholds to cripple his expansion. The pamphlets enter this conflict as a rival explanation of reality, while the authorities respond by treating their circulation as a security problem.

Cato's campaign also relies on far more forceful instruments. When he activates The Phage across the frontier, Chill Out saturates the air and micro-warframes assemble from the ground while additional frames fall from the sky. The pamphlets are the opposite face of that offensive: not coercive occupation, but an attempt to make contact before or alongside overwhelming technological intervention. Their existence complicates any simple division between liberation and domination, because Cato's program combines persuasion, aid, identity manipulation, biological weapons, and military seizure. The pamphlet is the form in which that contested program asks to be understood.

Significance and Afterlife

Cato's pamphlets matter because they convert an otherwise inaccessible figure into a reproducible presence. Cato may be distant, hidden behind agents, frames, portals, and orbital infrastructure, but a sheet can remain in a guild hall after he has disappeared from view. It can be memorized before being destroyed, carried across worlds, auctioned at great cost, or handed directly to a potential ally. Its vulnerability is part of its strength: unlike a System quest, it has to persuade through interpretation rather than through compulsory interface mechanics.

At the same time, the pamphlets cannot escape the structures they oppose. Their sellers must use System identities, avoid receipt tracking, exploit portal restrictions, and rely on disguised bodies. Their readers must judge whether the message is genuine while knowing that divine users may condemn possession of it. The document's circulation is therefore a struggle over who controls evidence, identity, and contact. It gives isolated individuals a way to imagine that the System is neither inevitable nor complete, but it also exposes them to the danger of being identified as Cato's agents.

The pamphlets' deepest narrative function is to make an alternative visible before it becomes institutionally secure. A glossy sheet, foreign food, unfamiliar art, and instructions written for a human reader can carry more destabilizing force than their size suggests. They create a chain from curiosity to suspicion, from suspicion to contact, and from contact to the possibility of leaving the System. In that chain, Cato's printed propaganda is both a message and a material breach: a small object through which an outside world begins to enter the System's reality.